selicos

Their level is set where it best feeds their revenue. Their security plays equally as well into their walled garden.

A $1.5Bil settlement just went in on stolen content used for training. It's arguably many times larger in long term damages especially compared to investment into those who stole the content.

If an AI company can scrape in billions of investment and keep going vs Facebook style "cost of doing business" fines, they will make that bet. If OpenAI can inject paid content, advice, misinformation, etc and keep operating or earn revenue today, it's worth doing. There are no ethics beyond optics.

I'm not saying these AI company CEOs would sell their mothers for more runway cash. But also nobody has seen their mothers since the second Sunday in May.

Clearly the best way to test these is a completely scientific and controlled process of prompting for a creature on a bicycle. Much like testing the fitness of a fish by making it climb a tree, the LLM will show its true colors when presented with the impossible task of rendering an image.

A password manager let's me use my service specific credential from any device, securely and decentralized.

Passkeys lock into a specific device and seem easy until you need to use another device.

But instead of being a credential you own and control, across what could even be a local password manager, it's one password to everything. Maybe it is more secure than a regular password in some cases but it largely seems like a worse fix than existing tools for a problem that has better solutions.

It makes sense for a work device that is off network/domain, but then it is your primary/only means of interfacing with services. Then you can consolidate under a Windows Hello passkey or something else.

The second you have a second device to log in from they are useless. The second you want or need to share a credential (smart or not) they are more work than a password.

The passkey trend seems lead by platforms that want to make it easier to get or stay logged in, Netflix type companies that want to prevent account sharing, and those that value convenience (if one device) over security.

Even my primary Credit Union is limiting teller roles in branches. There are still people to help, but then you have to go in person. My nearest branch is a day trip away but I can do most banking tasks at any partner CU location.

The what and why make sense. The how is poorly done. People are generally familiar with passwords but passkeys are different.

If another payment service offered the same or better protections by default with a lower or zero fee would you jump ship? Or would your bank at least offer that option?

The month to month changes and improvements across free tools is noticeable. A number of skills SE and other roles are built on (or people started with) like more simple scripting and automation work are reachable by a BA with proper requirements, some background with development/coding, and access to AI tools.

It's a continuation of both low code development tools and the ongoing compaction of development groups through DevOps. AI is enabling (vibe) code development by non devs. It's enabling a BA or even direct business rep to take requirements into a prototype or example.

LLMs are out of the box and will continue developing. How/If you use them is up to you.

Apple has taught their customer base well.

Apple has taught their costumers that Apple products are a style choice, a lifestyle product. It makes them boring. Their utility is secondary to their look and the added cost elevates that to a pain point.

Cost, limited OS/etc support, ignore/avoid their walled garden, not using any other apple devices, lac of reparability (historically)

Many many reasons to avoid Apple products. I still laugh at their 2012-14 era macbooks with a SATA cable that made 3 right angle turns and was easily the most replaced part at the college help desk I supported. How did they solve that? M.2 then soldered drives.

The Neo changes the price debate and their high RAM devices are coveted by devs I work with. But there are many reasons to avoid Apple if you aren't already in that ecosystem. You'd have to pay me to use an iPhone or daily drive a mac.

At least now window snapping is built in instead of a $5 add on for a feature 90% of Linux supports (and 100% of Windows since XP). Non Mac editing tools are very competitive. Unless you prefer Mac/Apple ecosystem or are using Mac specific apps there are other options I'd prefer.

Many places near me have different cash/card pricing from a % to a flat fee on the transaction. I've used debit cards to pay car repair bills to skip the 3% fee (sizeable on a $2500 repair).

Your incentives are paid by the retailer/vendor, if fees are covered by them. If you're paying that fee, which includes profit for the payment/card processes, you may be losing money using a credit card even with perks like points and cash back.

The adoption of standards like skills and agent setup helps a ton. Nobody wants to be locked into an AI vendor like with cloud systems in general. And companies can't hold on to the #1 spot across multiple areas for very long, so users are even more motivated to move their process and stack between coding tools and AI companies behind them like Claude code.

Vendor lock in cannot happen, or you're bankrupt.

You're forced to document every check and thought related to development until you're wiring a manual on how to be laid off (unless self employed or otherwise critical).

Which is fine. One should write quality docs and all that. But it seems exactly like training my offshore contract replacement instead of building tools for my own use. Except that income doesn't even go to a human just a black box datacenter company and shareholders.

Russian diminutives, making nicknames much harder to track for those not familiar with the culture and language. Vladimir is Vova is Volodya, same person. Then other parts of their full name may have variations depending on use.

In my experience it's more the Russian diminutives across the language that cause issues. If you're familiar with the nickname variations then it's easy to follow. If you aren't you'll be taking notes and looking up why Vladimir is called Vova or Volodya, or why Anna becomes Anya or Ayn.

It takes an adjustment or familiarity.

In my current use case I'm setting up a new Ubuntu server for hosting LLMs. I didn't take notes when setting it up last time around but want to document exactly what was required to pass on to coworkers trying something similar. I don't know what packages I installed to get the minimalist setup working vs what is installed by default. I'm tempted to nuke and redo with notes but I'm sure there is a better method of tracking down what I deployed to get to the current state.

...or not, and this is why HomeBrew exists and I need to learn it or ansible/etc.

It sounds like they ship a fairly minimal and efficient set of tools or text editor. This would be unwanted bloat by those choosing them for those advantages.

Audit purposes for sure. How was this code/concept generated, what were the prompts/requirements, what thinking did the model complete, can this be replicated or repeated, etc.

A vendor conference I was at a few weeks ago focused heavily on this, for most of their Agentic workflow items. How can you show the AIs work, prove what it did was within guidelines, then audit the process and result.

Like, if your system has an AI backed federated search for documents and you ask it a question about those documents, you need an audit trail of the ask, what documents were referenced, and what was returned to the user.

Then if wrong information was supplied that can be pinned down and explained in case of lawsuit or other need.

This seems like a perfect audit feature to flip back and train a model. Or ensure your human worker is working during business hours.

1000000/25/8/60 = 83+ lines of code per minute.

100000 LOC per month /25 days per month /8 hours per day / 60 minutes per hour

That seems...problematic for anyone doing code reviews.

The best strategy is to figure out what you are going to do after smoking weed before you smoke weed. So, draft your prompt and send it before lighting up.

This was a primary goal (if not states) of USAID and related programs. Stem the causes of immigration, support stability, and create goodwill for the donor country.

Still imperialistic and self serving in many ways, but it worked.

On the other hand, I've recently talked with a Polish to US immigrant who was moving back to Poland this summer as jobs and more had improved. They were competitive (in his mind) with the lack of opportunity and anti immigrant thinking across the US today.

This is in the direction of Mixture Of Export (MOE) setups. A trained 'router' sits on top of different expert models and routes work to the best/most efficient model for that task, and integrates the work into a whole to provide to the user.

At least, that is what I get from the MOE style. Small and fast experts with a router LLM on top to best use them, then the harness to keep it all together.

I agree with this. The stack seems to become:

LLM worker > Harness, Agents w/ skills > Human oversight/input

This is similar in structure to many teams I work with, something like:

Dev/SE/etc > PO > Manager/Director

Or whatever your current org structure relates. The LLM worker and Harness/Agents compact down to one human layer.

Now with MOE LLMs, the LLM layer is breaking into like:

LLM worker > LLM router > Harness, Agents w/ skills > Human oversight/input

Does that mean the Human element can be condensed to a single Manager with the right skills? A Director above them? Is the VP above them directing the agents?

Is this another variation of Conway's law, where orgs design systems that copy their own communication structure? Seems like that is how my Manager/Director approach it. Then again, they are making slide shows and obviously AI assisted reports, not something that needs to be stable and responsive for the entire product lifetime.

But to your point, the manager sees it as a structure to manage to increase productivity. The craftsman sees it as a tool to further their craft. Each is driven by a different methodology and use case. Can that mesh unless specifically directed to throw AI at no joy work?

If any work is blocked/etc, refund all credits from that session/last X minutes. Minimum.

1. It seeks to manipulate the information you see and your lens to the world. This is already partially true from independent and major publications.

As soon as we hand over searching out information to social media algorithms and LLM tools, we abandon our ability to see reality outside our direct vision.

Grok's ownership has already demonstrated capacity to influence major world elections and other events. You cannot trust it with this sort of information gathering and reporting.

US voters are defined by their apathy. Collective action is difficult even on areas most American's agree on due to shades of grey and implementation differences.

It may be analogous to vaccine adoption, with requirements in place for all (with some exceptions).

Who sets and applies the exceptions? A state or federal agency that runs afoul of free speech issues? An AMA type public board for social media use, quickly captured by the industry they serve to regulate? Parents themselves via opt out paperwork or ignoring the regulations?

I want to see more options debated or proposed for this sort of management, starting with right to privacy and your data, harsh punishment for promoting misinformation, and disclosure of algorithms/etc on what your feed includes.

Make all fines a flat % of revenue or an otherwise real amount to companies like Meta, not just a cost of business. Maybe pay users when their data is used/sold/etc, or otherwise increase the cost of what are basically information dragnets for advertising and manipulation.

Speed cameras, police with radar/etc, self reporting via insurance apps, controlled by GPS or speed limits in vehicles, etc

The tech is there but not applied equally. Regulations could limit every car to 70mph, or the (US) state to state max highway speeds. eBikes are sort of already doing this with categories based on max speed, in some states.

Then like speed limits and (emissions) regulations, people would find ways to bypass them. Rolling coal is one example. Electric 'bikes' that are basically mopeds or mini motorcycles don't require registration or licensing in many places, or at least don't enforce it.

How much freedom is the general populace willing to stomach? These age verification laws apply to everyone but tend to only impact nonvoters (age 17 and under). People are generally apathetic (especially US voters) and may comply with the easy option before fighting and preventing any "foot in the door" for this sort of policy.

I can't use Instagram due to the ratio of ads and sponsored posts yet apparently millions are fine with it. If they can send their ID and likeness to Meta once and continue to scroll, how much will they care?

Adding layers for accountability is a good idea. It needs to start with social media itself, including preventing misinformation and disclosing algorithm/behavior nudges designed to suck people in.

I want to try a hybrid setup of Gemma 4 E4B with lots of context for general, then Qwen 3.5 9B or larger for coding. Strix Halo set up this weekend, which may enable even larger Qwen models with tons of context.